Week 4 Day 2 – Productively Unproductive

Yesterday was a productively unproductive day … I was really having trouble focusing on my game, so I switched instead to doing some basic reading. I’m currently reading “The War of Art” and “The Healthy Programmer”. (“The War of Art” ended up being the push I needed to write this blog post!!)

The War of Art is basically a book of tough love, centered around overcoming creative/mental blocks … it takes a mentality of “Your craft is everything. Working on it will Suck. Ruthlessly pursue it – Tough through it, etc.” … While there are certainly some areas of the book that are problematic (or outright wrong), it has proven to be a a very helpful motivator. The other book I started today is the Healthy Programmer. Similarly, while I think there might be questionable thing or two, it’s proving to be a very useful tool for building healthier habits & I’m already working on incorporating some more regular exercise, and tweaking my diet so that instead of eating junk snacks, I eat fruit instead. I like that it’s very “One step at a time”

In addition to reading the books, I got to get a glimpse of Olivia‘s very cool project, which involves physics-based transformation of a wireframe map/model of Manhattan. I also paired with Nikki & set up a Virtual Env for alternate Python development. Afterwards, I realized that what I’d actually wanted to do was set up a Virtual Box (so that I can run Linux … yes, I know about Dual Booting … No, it’s not an option at present) … and I managed to get a Fedora Distro running. I tried to also get an Elementary distro running, but it got stuck during the install process. Then I got to see some of Nikki’s Pygcurse code – That looks like it will be fun to play with either late-batch or post-batch

After that, I started reading through Tansy‘s BitTorrent Code. I’m in over my head with that, but it’s proving to be educational, and will be a great foundation for when I start actively working on my BitTorrent Client (that’s my big goal (non-game) for my time in the Batch …)

For Day 3, I want to pick up with Tansy’s code & maybe just work on Python Fundamentals (with the Python Cookbook) more